We are rapidly approaching the era of Frankenfood and if the Agrocorp’s have their way we won’t even be able to grow our own. There is a movement to re-instate small farms and organic methods, but large corporations like Monsanto are buying influence in government, in our educational system, and even the corporate media.

In the farming department, Monsanto is so busy buying up the leading seed companies that the only way you can grow untainted food is to buy or borrow heirloom seed. So entrenched is this devious purveyor of poison and herbacides that, in some cases, it is actually illegal to grow organic food in your own garden.

All is not lost yet though, the folks in Chambersburg PA have formed their own legal coalition called the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund. Here’s an article from their web site…

Multinational agri-business corporations set out almost forty years ago to exterminate family farmers and take control of food production in the United States. That chilling proposition, which has been asserted by farming communities across the Country over the past decade, gained support last week with the release of a document authored by several agri-business corporations.

The 1962 strategy memorandum, entitled “An Adaptive Program for Agriculture”, was drafted by a group of multinational corporations called the “Committee for Economic Development” and it lays out a detailed plan for the decidedly un-American corporate takeover of an American institution – the family farm.

Chapter 6 of the memorandum calls for a two pronged strategy, either “(a) leakproof control of farm production by agri-business corporations” or “(b) a program, such as we are recommending here, to induce excess resources – primarily people – to move rapidly out of agriculture.”

One of those “excess resources” – an Illinois hog farmer named Keith Bolin – was one of the farmers who read the paper. In an interview done shortly after Farm Aid, Bolin spoke of the absolute control being exercised over hog prices by agri-business corporations. He explained that “Many factory farms are packer owned and packer controlled. And when the packers are short of hogs and they don’t want to bid up for my hogs, they flood the market with their own and drive the price down. They force me to chase the market down. They use their own hogs to drive the price lower.” Last year, Bolin lost thirteen months of net worth. Last month, he canceled his health insurance to cut his operating costs. Next year, he sees himself taking a job off the farm.

In blunt testimony before the Senate Ag Committee, he stated that “this is not about efficiency or inefficiency. It’s about control of our food supply by a few multinationals who are not loyal to Main Street, or rural America, or the American flag.”

A group of tea partiers and Second Amendment activists in New Mexico decided to kick off the new decade with a show of arms at a demonstration protesting President Obama’s “socialist” policies, according to local media reports via Think Progress.

Over three hundred people attended the protest in Alamogordo in southern New Mexico, which was organized by the Otero Tea Party Patriots and a group called the Second Amendment Task Force.

The Alamogordo Daily Newsgot a picture of one man with a rifle and a sign that says, “No To Obama Care / No To Congess (sic) Spending / No To Stimulus / Replace Comunist (sic) in DC”.

The AP reports that there were “plenty of handguns and rifles displayed … but no violence.”

The Daily News has lots of color from the event, including this description of an assault rifle-bearing husband and wife:

Orie Adcock and his wife, Juli, both of Roswell, came with identical scoped AR-15s slung over their shoulder.

“I heard about it through the grapevine and decided to come over to see what it’s all about,” Orie said. “We also wanted to express our First Amendment rights, as well as our Second Amendment rights.”

Then Orie started to explain how his AR-15 functions.

“It’s much like the ones that kids start out hunting rabbits and quail with,” he said. “According to the liberals, it’s one of those evil black rifles. I don’t discriminate. Black rifles are just fine with me.”

An internet-based “people power” campaign is asking its 60,000 members to draw up the “tough questions” that Tony Blair must be asked when he is questioned by the Iraq inquiry this year.

38 Degrees, a group set up last year in memory of the Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick, wants to ensure that Mr Blair is not let off the hook or allowed to answer the most sensitive questions in private.

Although Sir John Chilcot, the former Whitehall mandarin chairing the inquiry, has insisted that Mr Blair will be questioned mainly in public, critics of the 2003 invasion fear the former prime minister may cite national security in an attempt to ensure some of the hearing is behind closed doors.

An initial survey by 38 Degrees found strong demands among its members for Mr Blair to answer these questions:

Why did you insist that Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction were the reason to attack Iraq?

Did the Bush administration threaten, tacitly or otherwise, to withdraw American investment from the UK if it did not support the invasion?

Why was there no strategy to rebuild Iraq following Saddam’s overthrow?

What was the total value to the UK and its businesses of contracts arising directly from the Iraq invasion?

Why does the UK Government support the creation of new governments which oppress women more than their predecessors did?

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